Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (8 page)

At all times, the most unlikely situations are unfolding all around us. It is our own luck that allows us not to see it. Our luck allows us not to see the people in the shadows, or not to see them as they really are. It is the people in the shadows who see us as we really are.

5

A
kind of conjuration.

I am writing this sentence on June 21, 2007, almost exactly thirty-eight years after the night of the moon landing. I did not know the story of that night until a few months ago. Nine months ago, I knew almost nothing about my father at all. I am working from a stack of index cards, a time line filled out with notes taken in libraries and government agencies and in the room of my house that I use as a study. I have a banker’s box full of newspaper clippings, depositions, grand jury testimony, office correspondence. I have the interviews I did with journalists and former police officers, with my parents’ friends and relatives, with my mother. I have anecdotes like the one about the fortune-teller, the one about the night of the moon landing. I am trying to imagine how it all happened, trying to dramatize the scattered bits of information, to understand the nuances. I don’t know if anyone who knew my father will recognize this portrait I’m making. This portrait is crucially distorted by the way his life ended. When his friends and loved ones knew him, they didn’t know the future—the future had not yet distorted his image. I am adhering to the final shape, the unbeautiful shape of what happened, reconstructing an old mosaic with only a few of the tiles, letting the fragments suggest what might have been in the missing spaces.

Verde Lakes, Yavapai County, 2006

.  .  .

By the time I got to the exit to Camp Verde, it was snowing so hard that I could hardly discern the road from the empty land on either side of it. I didn’t know quite where I was going. The wipers were moving at full speed. There was a road called General Crook’s Trail, and I followed this road into an Old West town where the buildings, as much as I could see of them, were outsize brick or wood facades in front of rough, windowless boxes. There was a café, a title company, a store. I drove up and down the main street and finally pulled into the parking lot of the title company. It was snowing even harder by then, the sky getting darker, the day seeming to end already though it was not yet noon. A secretary told me there might be someone at the chamber of commerce who could give me a better map of the area. She knew where Verde Lakes was, but her directions were confusing. The chamber of commerce was staffed by an elderly woman with an odd, comical way of speaking that turned out to be unintentional. She wore a vest and owlish glasses and moved around in a determined way, finally providing me with a flier that had a vague map with stars on it for the area’s restaurants and motels. It wasn’t surprising to hear her story of dropping everything to come to this part of Arizona. She told me that she knew some people who lived in Verde Lakes. She said it was a shame what had happened there. The land, she said, had been sold as a retirement village to air force pilots stationed in Japan. Some of the lots were in a flood zone. She told me there’d been a terrible flood several years ago, in the 1980s, in which a woman died, pets were abandoned, garbage was left strewn in the limbs of trees. “I remember when that was still a ranch and I went up to Ned Warren and I asked him what he was doing building on a flood plain,” she said. “He told me the water never gets that high.”

She didn’t know my father’s name. I had talked to enough people in Arizona by then to not be surprised that she remembered Ned Warren. I left the chamber of commerce with the map and went back to my car. By then, there was a good three inches of snow and I was getting concerned about whether I’d be able to drive back to Phoenix if the storm persisted. I didn’t want to spend the night in Camp Verde. I drove with the radio off so I could concentrate better on the road. Verde Lakes was about a seven-minute drive from the chamber of commerce. Down the highway a few more miles was a state park and a little farther down was an Indian reservation casino, but Verde Lakes itself was just some land near nothing, a few trees and a grid of streets that looked like it had sat vacant for a long time before gradually accommodating a few trailers and simple one-story houses. It went on and on, block by block, a suburban neighborhood that had failed to appear—no homes in different styles, no landscaping or patios or decks. A school bus dropped off a few kids. Later, some teenagers walked by in black clothes and camouflage, part of a six-pack on a plastic tree, cigarettes. I was taking pictures of their neighborhood and I don’t know what that meant to them, or if it meant anything at all. They looked at me in my car and they became alert, self-conscious, their suspicion visibly turning from me to themselves.

There was a street there, as I knew there would be, called Zachary Lane. My mother had always told me about Zachary Lane, about how my father, in the early days of his land company, had named a street after me. There was another, longer street called Lazar Road: vacant lots, trailers, fences made of wire and stakes. On one of the street signs someone had taped up a homemade poster for a yard sale.

I’ve grabbed the brass ring.

I didn’t know the story of the brass ring or the moon landing on that day, but I sensed that this was not the kind of place my father had imagined. But perhaps he had simply not cared—perhaps I was naive about his motives or intentions. I knew I was not an objective judge. My emotions were carrying me from one conjecture to another. His life and death seemed pointless in that place. I thought he must have been either very foolish or very cynical, but neither view was very convincing.

Months later, I came across a memo from a journalist about my father.

Several different profiles have emerged of Lazar—a “sheep,” an aggressor, a devoted husband, a swinger—but no one seems sure which description fits the best.